Best WP Newspaper Site

The Express and Star is “Britain’s biggest and best regional newspaper online” and was founded in the 1880s. If you look closely, you’ll notice that their entire site including every article and feature is powered by WordPress. They now take the crown from NY Times for having the best URLs of a news site. (Though the Times now has clean URLs on their blogs.)

33 thoughts on “Best WP Newspaper Site”

I have to admit that when I first saw this post I thought you were talking about the Daily Express (http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/) and the Daily Star (http://www.dailystar.co.uk/) as being users of WordPress. As it is Expressand Star being a huge regional publicatio is still a significat coup.

That was a surprise seeing that name in your post. That’s the paper I grew up, far more than the nationals. My sisters and I used to fight about who would get it first. Now isn’t that a different world! Great to see they’ve moved well onto the web.

One thing that has always puzzled me about using any CMS out there is how to incorporate into the daily workflow of a newspaper. In the traditional sense, a magazine or newspaper is divided into sections, contained within issues, contained within volumes. The “now” nature of the Internet says that those notions should be tossed out the window, but it really helps tie into the print editions.

I can see how WordPress’s categories (and now tags?) create the basics for sections, but the task of building a librarian-friendly archive is a bit tricky. Take a look at their archive link and you can see that even this newspaper doesn’t even attempt to solve that quandary.

I can think of many college and community newspapers that would jump at the opportunity to run WordPress if these issues could be wrangled.

Drats. I tried to do this same idea when I was the editor of a paper in Harker Heights, Texas but my know how of WordPress was extremely limited at the time. I had hoped to get something setup that could be used by papers everywhere but alas in my frustration I gave up. Glad to see someone found a way around my frustration 😉

Even with the date-based system, you would still need to tie in a list of issues/volumes to coordinate with a particular publishing date. My college newspaper was a weekly, so each issue had was moved from a “next” status (the one we were working on that week) to a “current” status to make it live.

It’s a simple workflow that would allow you to publish an entire week’s worth of content at once, all with the same publish date. But again, it is one that allows the print version to dictate the way the online version operates.